‘Just get her chatting on the subject, if you can, and ask her casually. I agree that it’s important not to distress her. It might actually be better to let Danilo get away with it. In fact, I’ve been thinking about that for most of the night. He has been defrauding her of the prize money she might have won. How much would she mind?’
‘She might even laugh. Like you did just now. She might even think it was a pretty bright idea.’
‘Yes... Of course he has also been defrauding the South African betting public, but I suppose it’s up to the racing authorities here to deal with it, if they catch him.’
‘What makes you think it is Danilo?’
‘It’s so insubstantial,’ I said with frustration. ‘Mostly a matter of chance remarks and impressions, and terribly few facts. Well... for one thing, Danilo was around the horses when they started doing badly. Their jockey told me Danilo was in Africa then, in June, for a fortnight, which must have been just after he had stayed with Nerissa, because he talked about having seen her. After that he presumably went back to the States for a while, but the horses went on losing, so obviously he was not doing the actual stopping himself. It’s difficult to see how he could ever have the opportunity of doing it himself, anyway, but he seems to have an understanding with Arknold’s head lad: and I’ll admit that all I have to go on there, is the way they look at each other. Danilo never guards his face, by the way. He guards his tongue, but not his face. So suppose it is Barty, the head boy, who is arranging the actual fixing, with suitable rewards from Danilo.’
‘Well... if you are right... how?’
‘There are only two completely undetectable ways which can go on safely for a long time... over-exercising, which loses the race on the gallops at home (though in that case it is always the trainer who’s guilty, and people notice and talk)... and the way I think Barty must be using, the plain old simple bucket of water.’
Charlie said, ‘Keep a horse thirsty, maybe even put lashings of salt in its feed, and then give it a bucket or two of water before the race?’
‘Absolutely. The poor things can’t last the distance with three or four gallons sloshing around in their stomachs. And as for Barty... even if he were not always around to supply the water at the right time, he has all the other lads intimidated to such an extent that they’d probably cut off their own ears if he told them to.’
‘But,’ she objected, ‘if the head lad has been doing this for weeks and weeks surely the trainer would have cottoned on?’
‘I think he has,’ I agreed. ‘I don’t think he likes it, but he’s letting it pass. He said it was “too much” when one of Nerissa’s best colts got beaten out of sight yesterday in a poor class race. And then he himself gave me a version of what might be going on, and what may happen in the future. He accused me of implying that he was losing with the horses so that Nerissa would sell them: he would then buy them cheap, start winning, and sell them at a vast profit for stud. I had only vaguely been thinking along those lines, but he crystallised it as though the thought were by no means new to him. It was that, really, which set me wondering about Danilo. That, and the way he was smiling while he watched one of the horses go out to race. That smile was all wrong. Anyway... if he can reduce the value of the horses to nearly nil by Nerissa’s death, there will be a great deal less duty to pay on them than if they were all winning. The difference would run into many thousands, considering there are eleven horses. That would be a profit well worth the outlay on a couple of trips to South Africa and payola for the head lad. I think they are going to change the system, but as the tax laws stand at present he would have to be in line for the residue of the estate, for there to be any point in his doing it.’
‘Unscramble my brains,’ Charlie said.
I laughed. ‘Well. Estate duty will be paid on everything Nerissa owns. Then the separate bequests will be handed out. Then what is left will be the residue. Even though the horses are in South Africa, estate duty on them will be levied in England, because Nerissa lives there. So if the estate has to pay out all those thousands in death duties on the horses, there will be that many thousands less in the residue for Danilo to inherit.’
‘Gotcha,’ she said. ‘And wow again.’
‘Then, after they are safely his, he stops the watering lark, lets them win, sells them or puts them to stud, and collects some more lolly.’
‘Oh, neat. Very neat.’
‘Pretty simple, too.’
‘I say,’ she said, ‘isn’t there anything we could try along the same lines? All that mountain of surtax we pay... and then when one of us dies we lose another terrific chunk of what we’ve paid tax on once already.’
I smiled. ‘Can’t think of anything which fluctuates in value so easily as a horse.’
‘Let’s buy some more, then.’
‘And of course you have to know, pretty well to a month, exactly when you are going to die.’
‘Oh damn it,’ Charlie said laughing. ‘Life is a lot of little green apples and pains in the neck.’
‘I wonder if “a pain in the neck” originated from the axe.’
‘The axeman cometh,’ she said. ‘Or for axe, read tax.’
‘I’ll bring you back a nugget or two from the gold mine,’ I promised.
‘Oh thanks.’
‘And I’ll telephone again on... say... Thursday evening. I’ll be down in the Kruger Park by then. Would Thursday be O.K. for you?’
‘Yes,’ she said soberly, the fun vanishing like mist. ‘I’ll go over to Nerissa’s before then, and see what I can find out.’
Chapter Nine
You can’t keep a good Dakota down.
There were two of them waiting at the small Rand Airport near Germiston racecourse, sitting on their tail wheels and pointing their dolphin snouts hopefully to the sky.
We onloaded one of them at eight on Monday morning, along with several other passengers and a sizeable amount of freight. Day and time were unkind to Roderick, making it clearer than ever that letting go of a semblance of youth was long overdue. The mature man, I reflected, was in danger of wasting altogether the period when he could look most impressive: if Roderick were not careful he would slip straight from ageing youth to obvious old age, a mistake more often found in show business than journalism.
He was wearing a brown long-sleeved suede jacket with fringes hanging from every possible edge. Under that, an open-necked shirt in an orange-tan colour, trousers which were cut to prove masculinity, and the latest thing in desert boots.
Van Huren, at the other end of the scale in dark city suit, arrived last, took control easily, and shunted us all aboard. The Dakota trip took an hour, and landed one hundred and sixty miles south, at an isolated mining town which had Welkom on the mat and on practically everything else.
The van Huren mine was on the far side from the airport, and a small bus had come to fetch us. The town was neat, modern, geometrical, with straight bright rows of little square houses and acres of glass-walled supermarkets. A town of hygienic packaging, with its life blood deep underground.
Our destination looked at first sight to be a collection of huge whitish grey tips, one with its railway track climbing to the top. Closer acquaintance revealed the wheel-in-scaffolding at the top of the shaft, masses of administration buildings and miners’ hostels, and dozens of decorative date palms. The short frondy trees, their sunlit leaf-branches chattering gently in the light breeze, did a fair job at beating the starkness, like gift-wrapping on a shovel.
Van Huren apologised with a smile for not being able to go down the mine with us himself: he had meetings all morning which could not be switched.